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Are you ready to abandon your dislpay campaign? You might want to read this first!
Display ads (or banner ads) can play an important role in your media mix if implemented well. Where display advertising campaigns fail is often not in strategic setup or conversion optimization, but in tracking and analysis. Instead of focusing this post on proper campaign setup and creating compelling ads, today I want to focus on measuring your campaign correctly.
Good tracking tells you what's broken.
Too often we see clients judging campaigns based on faulty data, poor expectations, or arbitrary measurements. They end up changing something that is not broken or abandoning their display campaigns all together. You could be the one wondering "why aren't my display ads working" when, in fact, they might be doing exactly what you need them to be doing.
(Good) Display Advertising works.
It is important to understand how display advertising works. The common assumption is that, because they are a digital form of advertising, the success of banner ads should be measured by clicks or by the activity that occurs on your site after the click. Relying on these metrics is faulty thinking that usually comes from not understanding the bigger picture or how users interact with banner ads. To better understand here are a few important facts every display advertiser should know from Solve Media.
- You are more likely to survive a plane crash than click on a banner ad.
- You are more likely to get a full house by playing poker than click on a banner ad.
- You are more likely to summit Mount Everest than click on a banner ad.
- You are more likely to get into MIT than click a banner ad.
And Banner Ads still matter!
These facts make it sound like we should stop placing banner ads immediately and move on to something that actually works. However, note that the above points all hinge on clicking on the banner ad. This is precisely why you cannot accurately measure the effectiveness of your display campaigns by looking at clicks or post-click activity as your main measurement.
You might think you're ignoring those ads.
Think about your own online habits. If you are on a website, you are there for a reason – to check sports scores, read your favorite blogs, check up on politics, find a recipe, or look up reviews on something you want to buy. You are very unlikely to interrupt your current activity to click on a banner ad. What you will do, however, is notice that banner either consciously or subconsciously. With most forms of broad-reach media, after three or more exposures to an ad, you will be more likely to recall the message. But the odds are still stacked against your clicking on that ad. Instead, when you are ready to do an activity that's relevant to the topic of the ad, your brain will recall the message and to take action on the ad. You will then either go to a search engine and search for what you remembered from the ad or you will type the advertiser's name directly into your browser's address bar. This is how you will get to the website without ever clicking on a banner ad, and it happens all the time.
Clickers are nice. Buyers are better.
When this chain of events occurs, the banner ad campaign has been successful. But if you are only measuring clicks and post-click activity then you are going to be led to believe that your display campaign is not working.
Now that you understand how users interact with banner ads here are a few more reasons clicks and click-thru-rates are the wrong metric for you to be measuring your display campaign by:
- Only 8% of users account for 85% of clicks on display ads (and some of these aren't even humans!) (Source: comScore)
- Clickers are NOT Buyers! In the Quantcast data below for this particular study you can see that clickers are more likely to be under 24 or over 65, while customers (converters) are 25-44. In other studies we see the same dynamic. The clickers are consistently not the users who turn into buyers.
This proves that if we focus on the click data we will not reach our best segment.
Here's what you should measure.
So if you're asking yourself, "Why is my display campaign not working?" you may want to go back and make sure you are measuring it properly. In order to determine if your Display campaign is working you need to track post-impressions and cost per actions (eCPA). Post impressions allow you to track what a customer does after your ad has been delivered to them -- whether they have clicked on your ad or not. Once you start tracking this data, you won't have to rely on incomplete insight into your campaign or focus only on click and CTR metrics. If you are there's a good change you are actually anti-optimizing for sales.
